'Under The Dome' Piracy Spikes As Time Warner Cable's CBS Blackout Continues

As Time Warner Cable and CBS duke it out in their war over programming fees, customers are finding alternative ways to catch their favorite shows.

In the areas affected by Time Warner Cable's blackout of CBS-owned channels, illegal downloads have greatly increased over the past week, Deadline reports.

And what was the most illegally downloaded program? The file-sharing blog Torrent Freak reports that it was the CBS show "Under The Dome," based on Stephen King's novel.

Downloads of the breakout summer hit increased 34 percent over the weekend. So the site began monitoring U.S. BitTorrent downloads of Monday's episode of the show. It found that piracy of last week's episode was largely less than that of the most recent "Dome" episode.

Currently, TWC customers in Los Angeles, New York City, Chicago and several other locations are affected by the blackout.

In New York City, the piracy rate for "Dome" increased from 1.3 percent of all U.S. downloads last week to 3 percent this week, more than doubling the previous week's numbers. Torrent Freak added that more research needs to be done on the numbers collected, but it did note that "Dome" is one of the most downloaded shows at the moment.

Negotiations between TWC and CBS resumed today. More than 3 million customers have been affected by the blackout, Reuters reports.